Do you already believe that you have some bitterness in your heart? Or do you think you’re pretty good about not feeling bitter? According to pastor and counselor Stephen Viars in Overcoming Bitterness: Moving from Life’s Greatest Hurts to a Life Filled with Joy, bitterness is a reality for everyone. As a reader of this book, you may be surprised at some of the small ways bitterness has crept into your thoughts and life. And for some of you, unaddressed bitterness could be fueling other issues you’re dealing with, like anxiety, depression, and spiritual stuntedness. The book provides questions and exercises at the end of each chapter for individual reflection and for group discussion. This article provides an overall review of the book.

Some Motivations For Reading This Book

• Tiny seeds of bitterness can be hard to detect, but learning to spot even the smallest cells of bitterness will help you prevent them from becoming deep bitter roots
• Increasing self-awareness regarding bitterness in your heart can help you reduce sin
• Being encouraged to resist bitterness by lovingly enduring hard things also enhances your character, produces godliness, and increases your confidence
• It can be natural and easy to feel all your feelings, including negative, harmful emotions, but lamenting is an artful, productive skill worth developing for overall well-being and purpose

Features of this Book

• Well organized and easy-to-follow format
• Careful, contextual, and relational Scriptural teaching
• Helpful, detailed explanations of the formation of bitterness, the categories of bitterness, responses to bitterness, and how the Lord uses bitter conditions
• Empathetic encouragement towards being comforted, gaining understanding, pursuing healing and freedom, and taking personal responsibility  
• Many Biblical instances and stories of bitterness and responses that lead to transformation
• Tools for becoming less sinfully bitter and more like Christ

Concepts of This Book

When You’ve Been Treated Bitterly

• Whether you endure unhealthy suffering in silence or whether you grumble and complain, the two responses are equally problematic
• Instead, there is sweetness to be found when you look in the right places for a best response

“Hard roads can actually be good if they lead to delightful destinations.”

How To Handle Life’s Problems with Less Bitterness

• The Biblical way, not the world’s way
• Facing painful matters you don’t know how or want to face
• Learning the art of practicing biblical lament
• Wisely applying the gospel to the heart

“I strongly believe that learning to practice biblical lament is one of the keys to facing and properly handling bitter circumstances before crossing the line into one of the sinful expressions of bitterness.”

When Your Heart Is Bitter

And what is sinful bitterness? It’s unresolved anger, jealousy, selfishness, and pride often accompanied by behavior that dishonors God and hurts others. This emotional state is rooted in unbelief due to certain pains and disappointments not being processed through the lens of God’s eternal plan and purposes. To overcome the entrapment of these feelings and actions, this book will elaboratively teach you how to:

• Find good reasons to change any bitter ways of thinking, feeling, and acting
• Trust God’s Word, character, and plan especially in uncomfortable situations and when His plans are different than our own
• Use your faith to remove the bitterness that’s been robbing you of believing in His goodness even when times are hard
• Crucify desires that displease God (but often give you instant gratification) by acting on desires that are consistent with the truth of God’s Word (even choosing what is good at an initial personal cost to you)
• Learn to love God’s discipline (not the same thing as His judgmental punishment) and receiving the purification to becoming Christ-like
• Fight (daily, if that’s what it takes) the enslavement of bitterness, including taming a bitter tongue, with gospel truth and strength
• Recognize your unique tendencies towards bitterness
• Freely receive the peace, joy, wisdom, and satisfaction from God that holding onto bitterness can never provide
• Grasp the reality that bitterness is not something to simply remove; it must be actively replaced with corrected beliefs and desires that lead to sweet communion with Christ

“Even Christians have the capacity to create and then act on new desires each day that take us away from joyful satisfaction in God and straight down the road that leads to sinful bitterness.”

Benefit of This Book

Learning how to rid your heart of bitterness and controlling the presence of bitterness in your life will enable you to be a life-giver to others and to find deeper satisfaction in your faith.

“Would those around us who are watching the way we live and listening to the way we talk conclude we are living under the shadow of God’s wings?”

This book is such a thorough study of the matter of bitterness found in Scripture that if you view this book as a “textbook” and allow this “course” to humble you and slow you down to gain deep learning, you can find yourself changed, healed, and at peace. You could spend several months or up to a full year using this book to point you to the Bible for reduction of bitterness both in your heart and in your home. Or, even if you don’t have margin for that right now, just a first read of the book can help give you a new mindset for guarding against bitterness.

Prayer & Blessing

Refuse to be like Esau who was bitter, defiled, and found no place for repentance. And instead may you look to Jesus who endured the cross for eternal joy. (Heb. 12:2,14-17)

“When God is the One under whose wings you come to seek refuge, you can be sure that He is working behind the scenes in ways that will astonish you.”